News - 16.06.11

WofA launched its new image

Wines of Argentina presented its new identity to the media in Buenos Aires. The new brand will now be used in all the promotional activities carried out by this organization abroad. WofA decided to rely on a strategy that aims at communicating the contrasts that define Argentina and the diverse aspects of its culture.

Wines of Argentina presented its new identity to the media in Buenos Aires. The new brand will now be used in all the promotional activities carried out by this organization abroad. WofA decided to rely on a strategy that aims at communicating the contrasts that define Argentina and the diverse aspects of its culture.

The announcement was made on Monday June 13 at Luigi Bosca’s offices in Puerto Madero. Among the media outlets present were the magazines Apertura, Target and Carta de Publicidad, and the newspapers El Cronista, La Nación, BAE, Iprofesional and d-biz.

Alberto Arizu, president of Wines of Argentina, opened the meeting and shared with the attendees a report on the evolution of wine exports since 2003. In relation to this, he stressed the fact that Argentina continues to expand in the world markets as a top-quality wine producer. He also informed that the value of Argentina’s bottled wine exports is expected to reach nearly USD 750 million in 2011, which would represent a fourfold increase with respect to 2004, when the real exporting boom began.

Arizu highlighted that when Argentina was unknown to the international market, it was necessary to start by basically communicating that Argentina was indeed a wine-producing country with varied resources. He also said that starting in 2003, Argentina mainly focused on promoting Malbec, and that the emphasis later shifted to associating the brand image with the country’s hallmarks, such as soccer and tango. However, Arizu maintained that “it is now time to resort to a more sophisticated strategy to position our wines.” The wine industry aims at reaching a volume of exports worth USD 1,200 million by 2014.

Later during the meeting, Laura Alfano, director of Estrategia, and Guillermo Altube, creative director of FutureBrand Southern Cone, were in charge of presenting the development of Wines of Argentina’s new visual identity. The experts referred to the research they conducted prior to making a final decision on the new identity, the different steps they took during the creative process, and they finally showed the new brand, with its various application options.

FutureBrand, a consulting company specialized in branding, started working on this project six months ago and came up with a radically and substantially new communication strategy for the brand Vino Argentino. The new strategy focuses on contrasts, a distinguishing trait of the Argentine people, according to the creative experts. They found that the brand-new image openly expresses the nuances and contradictions that make Argentines unique: the authenticity of the people and their wines, the vastness of the territory – with its huge variety of terroirs – and the wine culture, with its European heritage and Latin roots.

According to the experts, Argentine people are imbued with mutually exclusive yet coexisting values: elegance and informality, passion and thoughtfulness, savagery and friendliness, sociability and individualism.

Wines of Argentina’s new brand will be used as a personal, unique hallmark in the communication activities that the local wineries will carry out in the international markets. It will encapsulate a new concept that is capable of both articulating a discourse on the Argentine identity and communicating the special features of the Argentine wine industry.

The essence of the brand was based on a figure of speech, the oxymoron, which accurately represents us, as it brings together two opposite words or phrases within the same syntactic structure to give rise to a new meaning. In this way, it was possible to address the complexity of the Argentine culture, whose contradictions, far from canceling each other out, are nourishing and enriching. The coexistence of organic and geometrical shapes, curves and straight lines, define a space where opposites exist side by side but do not merge. The black and white colors represent the unquestionable sophistication of our wines, while magenta brings differentiation, irreverence and freshness, and connects us to the world of wine through the intensity, warmth and passion it denotes.

The brand will be presented internationally at Vinexpo, a biennial wine and spirits exhibition to be held June 19 through June 23 in Bordeaux, France.